YU Learning Assessment

Our Commitment

Welcome to the Yeshiva University Learning Assessment website. At Yeshiva University we are committed to student learning assessment in order to ensure that our colleges and schools, programs/majors, and courses are successfully fulfilling their educational missions, goals, and objectives. The purpose of this website is to provide faculty and staff with assessment-related tools and resources to help guide development and implementation of effective learning assessment plans.

Learning Assessment Spotlight:

Department of Mathematical Science, Yeshiva University

by

Dr. Thomas Otway, Professor and Department Chair

Assessment of the computer science curriculum was
facilitated by the way in which the computer science curriculum evolved. Many
years ago, Michael Breban, with the help of Arnold Lebow and other department
faculty, put together a computer science program at Yeshiva College which
conforms to Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) standards. In an
ACM-approved curriculum, courses are designed to implement learning goals that
practicing computer scientists feel are important for graduates of computer
science programs. When Van Kelly joined the department in 2010, he enhanced
that curriculum with courses that reflect very recent trends and concerns in
industrial computing. The curriculum map that we prepared for the formal
assessment turned out to be a natural way to organize the goals that had been
already built into the curriculum. The careful tracking of student performance is
also standard procedure for our computer science faculty. What is new is that
such data are now concentrated in one source available to the entire
department, rather than being scattered in an assortment of directories in
various individual faculty computers, and are assessed using metrics that have
been agreed upon by the computer science faculty. The national societies for
many fields release standards for specialized education in that field. We found
these standards to be quite useful as a general guide for assessing student
learning in computer science.

Concretely, the curriculum map for the computer science
program was constructed as follows. First, the topics of the required courses
were written down. We asked ourselves how each topic contributes to the
education of a computer scientist. Then we compared those results to the
general goals for computer science programs in the ACM guidelines that we
follow. In this way, the curriculum map was "reverse-engineered" from
the required course offerings. The ACM guidelines (including very recent ones
which have just been released) were also reviewed, to decide whether all of the
ACM guidelines were represented in the curriculum. The curriculum map is, except
for that last step, the inverse of the process which originally created the
current computer science major at Yeshiva College from the ACM guidelines in
the 1990s.

Assessment of the curriculum in mathematics is more
complicated, for several reasons: there are three different tracks (the actuarial
science track, the computer track, and the general track); the program is given
on two campuses, partly with shared faculty, and with slight differences in
curriculum; and three degrees are given, the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. It was
found, for example, that splitting the assessment of advanced courses into the
three tracks produced differences among the subgroups which were statistically
insignificant; for that reason, achievement of learning goals for each course
in the Mathematics program at each campus is assessed for the whole class,
rather than for the students in each separate track. (Assessing courses by
track has the additional disadvantage that students tend not to formally
declare their track until they apply for the degree.) Although we pool data
among the tracks, we do not pool data across the campuses. For historical
reasons, and because of differences in faculty specialization, the rubrics
adopted at the two campuses are similar, but not identical. For example,
computer science is integrated into the electives for the major at Beren
Campus, whereas it is a separate track of the major at Wilf Campus. Also, there are options for the Advanced Calculus
requirement at Beren, so those options needed to be taken into account when
determining the rubrics for that campus. We also found that assessment practices
for the department’s small doctoral program differed qualitatively from
assessment of the undergraduate programs. The main difference is that on the
doctoral level, quantifiable progress in student learning may not be evident
for several semesters, due to the nature of advanced research in mathematics.

The adoption of rubrics for the Mathematics program required
a certain amount of self-discipline. Certain of the faculty have some doubts
that the standard, traditional mathematics curriculum is the best possible for
majors. The adoption of such a curriculum in a mathematics department such as
ours, having a very small faculty, a large number of majors, and a truly huge
number of students in our many service courses, is as much a response to the
expectations of other departments, professional programs, and employers as it
is an expression of our shared belief about what constitutes the best
preparation in mathematics. But we realized that assessment activities have to be
directed at the program that we have rather than at the program that many of us
would like to have under better conditions. Revisions in the program, which are
instituted continually to meet changing conditions but which are subject to the
usual external constraints, are only reflected in the rubrics once the
revisions have been fully incorporated into program requirements. This policy
allowed us to focus on the question of whether current learning objectives are
being achieved.

Physics
Department, Stern College for Women

by,

Dr. Anatoly I. Frenkel, Department Chair

During the Spring 2014 semester, we designed and applied rubrics to assess
eight program-level Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) for our four core
programs: General Education courses, Major in Physics, Major in Physical
Sciences, and Major in Pre-Engineering.

For example, in the General Education courses, one of the objectives is for
students to be able to know the fundamental physics laws (in their most general
formulations) and understand their physical implications.In addition, we want students to know how to
adapt these general formulations to concrete applications.As another example, in the Major in Physics
program, a key objective is for students to be able to choose relevant theories
and research for solving a specific physics problem. Other student learning
objectives relate to the knowledge of fundamental physics laws and concepts and
their implications, numerical insights in solving problems, and analytical
techniques in laboratory settings.

To determine whether students are attaining program-level objectives in
their physics courses, we collected and analyzed various sources of performance
data from tests, lab reports, and student presentations using faculty designed
rubrics.More specifically, for each
program-level SLO, a Department faculty member, often in consultation with
other faculty, designed a rubric to analyze student work in light of the
program-level objective.The final
version of the rubric was approved by the entire Department.Departmental assistant, Rakhi Podder performed statistical analyses of all data collected by
faculty in their classes. At the faculty meeting on March 26, 2014, these data
were discussed and used to identify problems that students are having with
different program components, such as appropriate mathematical background
for some advanced courses, and also to reveal students’ particular strengths
(e.g., graphical representation of concepts)

At the end of the Spring semester, the analysis will be complete and the Department’s
faculty will meet again to discuss possible changes in the programs and, if
needed, in the SLOs. A new set of SLOs will be tested during
the Fall 2014 semester.